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Dancer in the Dark: Ross Partridge’s Gutsy Lamb
A minor blip on a warm Chicago afternoon. No one seems to notice that an 11-year-old waif, Tommie (a precocious Oona Laurence) is grabbed and pushed into a car by a stranger, the 47-year-old David Lamb...
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Prime Time: Jacob Gentry’s Synchronicity
Among Synchronicity director Jacob Gentry’s formidable gifts is a sharpened sensitivity to context, background, and setting that frees him to put in his characters’ mouths dialogue that might seem in...
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Flesh and Blood: A War
Written and directed by Tobias Lindholm (A Hijacking), A War — one of the five nominees for Best Foreign Language Film — examines the divide between the military and domestic spheres in the life of...
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Sex Ed: Stephanie Rothman’s The Student Nurses
During a moment of high drama in the very special cult item The Student Nurses, which runs in a restored version at the new Metrograph in New York’s Lower East Side for one week beginning March 11, a...
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Breaking: The Wave
You can’t always get what you want But if you try sometimes you might find You get what you need — The Rolling Stones “Once these mountains grab a hold of you, they never let you go.” In Roar Uthaug’s...
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Spotlight: Gabriel Mascaro’s Neon Bull
“Sand that tail!” Iremar (rising star Juliano Cazare), a musky, melancholy young vaquero, or bull handler, is shouting at Ze (Carlos Pessoa), his flabby, more light-spirited compadre on the service...
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Through a Glass Darkly: Men & Chicken
I really wanted to be a Jew, and then I found out that I was really a Nazi, because my family is German. And that also gave me some pleasure. So, I, what can I say? I understand Hitler….How do I get...
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Unbuttoned: Maya Vitkova’s Viktoria
There is little navel-gazing in writer/director/co-producer Maya Vitkova’s Viktoria, in spite of the film’s specific focus and autobiographical elements. In fact, there is no navel at all on its...
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Friend or Foe: Maggie’s Plan
Until filmmaker, novelist, and funnywoman Rebecca Miller weighed in with the invigorating Maggie’s Plan, the history of films addressing the impasse between order and randomness — in theological terms,...
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Les Affaires: Benoît Jacquot’s Diary of a Chambermaid
How to adapt a French epistolary novel relayed by a luscious servant from her point of view — itself a subversive proposition when it came out in 1900 — about the relationships she develops in assorted...
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The Wrong Box: Zach Clark’s Little Sister, MoMA’s Sally Bergerless Doc Fortnight
“I needed structure!” says former goth Colleen Lunsford (Addison Timlin, star-to-be) in a revelatory moment in Little Sister, the latest feature by Brooklyn-based Zach Clark (White Reindeer, Vacation)....
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Doctor’s Order: The Innocents
Determinism or free will? I’m flummoxed. This is my second successive review of a film about nuns. The first was Zach Clark’s Little Sister, in which meek ex-goth Colleen Lunsford (Addison Timlin) is a...
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Separation Anxiety: Men Go to Battle
The lives of the young, illiterate Mellon brothers, Henry (Tim Morton) and Francis (David Maloney), whose world barely extends beyond their small, unproductive farm in Small’s Corner, Kentucky, might...
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Fabled: The Childhood of a Leader
Youthful innocents relish playing the part of amateur cartographer for school assignments, drawing prats, or, even more fun, molding contours from papier-mache. Seven-year-old Prescott (Tom Sweet), the...
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Acting Out: Ira Sachs’s Little Men
Friendships have boundaries and limits. Aristotle wrote of perfect friends in his Ethics, noting that totals must remain low. Sounds much like romance to me: Is the new bff the one? The philosopher...
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Freeze Frame: In Order of Disappearance
A blond, fair-skinned Swedish actor playing a petit-bourgeois Swede of the old school who resurfaces in the Norway of the overnight economic miracle, the ubiquitous Stellan Skarsgard looks as blank in...
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Disbelief: Federico Veiroj’s The Apostate
Barring lapse or conversion, how do you spurn religion? For centuries, Catholics have had a formal means to renounce the Church: apostasy. The tedious process, sometimes ritualized with a walk...
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Studio 54: The New York Film Festival, Part I
On the evidence of the finest films in the first third of this 54th edition of the New York Film Festival, those familiar with the exhibitionistic, amped-up social set that frolicked in, gawked at, or...
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Makeovers: The New York Film Festival, Part II
Every film not only tells a story but is a story. Lumping several movies together to find commonality is a perilous pursuit. For example, we have to determine if shared traits operate at the level of...
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Body and Soul: New York Film Festival, Part III
There are fewer films to deal with in this last of a three-feature curtain raiser. Writing commentary on the selections in the other two — six and five films, respectively — is enervating after...
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